The Garrett Diet Hack

Sometime in my senior year in college, my weight topped 190 pounds, and I never looked back. At just over 200 pounds, I am not terribly overweight, but I would certainly like to get rid of the extra belly. If you have ever dieted, you surely know that losing the last ten pounds is the most difficult.

A few weeks ago I had an idea for a simple diet technique that is based on the fundamental laws of nature. As far as I know, it hasn't been tried yet, so I am calling it the Garrett Diet Hack until someone shows me it has already been done. It is a "Diet Hack" because it isn't a diet per se, where I tell you what you should eat. This is more a life hack than a diet. We all know what we should and shouldn't eat.

Potato chips = Bad.
Spinach = Good.

You don't need me to tell you that! But I bet you eat more potato chips than spinach. I don't care what you eat. If you follow this technique you MUST lose weight. You can combine this Diet Hack with any other diet to enhance that diet's effects.

Laws of Conservation

Let's start with why it works, and then move on to how it works.

In physics and chemistry, the law of conservation of mass states that, in a closed system, mass can neither be created nor destroyed. Likewise, the law of conservation of energy states that energy can neither be created nor destroyed. The only exceptions are nuclear reactions, which certainly do not take place in your body. (Even if you eat "nuclear" chicken wings.) If your body were a "closed system" then you would never gain or lose any weight.

However, your body is not a closed system. You eat food or drink liquids, taking in mass and energy. You lose mass by sweating, breathing out carbon dioxide, urinating, and defecating. You lose energy constantly as your body burns the food you have taken in. The amount of energy you lose depends on how active you are.

When we say that we "take in energy," what we really mean is that we are taking in food that has chemical energy to be burned into something with lower chemical energy. Sometimes people will say that a certain number of calories is "equivalent to" a certain number of pounds in your body, but this is misleading. Your body cannot convert energy directly into mass. What your body really does is take one high-energy chemical, like sugar, and convert it into a mixture of other chemicals, like proteins, fat, and carbon dioxide. No matter what it converts the sugar into, the mass of the chemicals it has produced will always be equal to the starting chemicals.

When you gain weight, you have taken in a certain mass of food that your body doesn't need at the time. Your body stores that food for later use, mostly in the form of fat. When you lose weight, your body is reaching back into that store to compensate for a reduced amount of energy-rich food taken in.

On to the Diet Hack...

How does this relate to dieting? Let's say you weigh 200 pounds. If you eat 2 pounds of food, then you cannot, according to the laws of physics, gain more than two pounds. You will weigh 202 pounds.

Fasting

If instead of eating 2 pounds, you fast all day, then by the next day you will have lost some weight. Your body MUST burn some energy to keep you alive, and that energy MUST come from stored chemicals in your body. Your body MUST keep breathing and burning some of your stored fat, in the process releasing carbon dioxide, and making you lighter. The fundamental laws of the universe guarantee that you will lose weight if you fast!

Alas, if only it were that simple. Fasting is one of the worst ways to lose weight, because your body simply bounces back as soon as you eat again. You will be extra hungry the following day, so you will eat extra food. Your body is also "accustomed to" being at that weight, and will work harder to store the food that you do eat.

However, let's stick to the fasting example for a minute. Let's say you weigh 200 pounds, you fast for a day, and on the second day you have lost 2 pounds. Now you weigh 198 pounds. If you were to eat only one pound of food, then you would weigh 199 pounds. That one pound of food could be ANYTHING. It could be a pound cake. You would still only weigh 199 pounds. You would have lost one pound.

Gradual Weight Loss

This diet hack is a more gradual extension of the fasting example. We start with a target weight. The target weight will be slightly above your actual body weight, and it is based on the foods that you are currently eating at the start of the diet. If you weigh 200 pounds now, and you typically eat three pounds of food per day, then your starting target weight would be 203 pounds. Each morning you subtract your weight from 203, and that is how much food you can eat.

Amount of food you can eat today = Target Weight - Actual Weight Today

The target weight is reduced by one pound per week. So, continuing the example above, the second week's target will be 202 pounds. If you still weigh 200 pounds at the end of the first week, now you can only eat two pounds of food. You "could" compensate by eating two pounds of high energy food, but you will only be cheating yourself, because the following week will only be harder when your target is 201 pounds.

Although your target weight changes once a week, the amount of food you can eat will change every day. Based on your weight in the morning, you are allowed to eat a certain amount of weight in food. You will notice right away if something you ate yesterday has caused you to retain weight.

EVERYTHING that you ingest that has calories in it must be counted to make this work. You can drink as much zero-calorie liquids as you want, and you don't need to measure them. Even though you temporarily gain weight when you drink water, it passes right through your body, so we're not going to worry about it. But everything else must be counted. Desserts, snacks, healthy and unhealthy foods, juice, lettuce, alcoholic beverages, all must be weighed and counted.

This is different from most other diets that say you should never weigh your self more than once a week or once a month. With this technique, I advocate weighing yourself every day. You will get instant gratification for everything you do. Going for a jog before you weigh yourself will show up immediately. Eating lots of fiber will mean that you stay regular and "lose weight" through bowel movements.

The first victim

To my knowledge, this hack has never been tested. I will be the first guinea pig. I suspect it may be psychologically difficult, so you will get to see me suffer (or not) and decide whether this might work for you.

Materials

I am a big believer in simplicity leading to success. The more complicated a diet (or any other program) is, the less likely I am to follow it. The required materials for this diet hack are:

• A high quality bathroom scale with a digital readout
• A high quality kitchen scale, also with a digital readout, for weighing food.
• Index cards for writing down your weight and targets
  

I will also be monitoring everything closely on an Excel spreadsheet, but you don't need to do that. The above materials are all you need.

Step 1: Determining My Target Weight

For the past three days, I have been weighing myself to determine a target weight.

Here's the data I have gathered so far:

Date	Body Weight	Weight of All Food and Drink
February 10	202.4 lbs	50.5 ounces (3 pounds 2.5 ounces)
February 11	200.6 lbs	38.5 ounces (2 pounds 6.5 ounces)
February 12	198.8 lbs	46.5 ounces (2 pounds 14.5 ounces)

Interesting! I haven't even started the diet yet, and I am already losing weight! I have already discovered that the very act of weighing food makes me think about what I am putting into my body. In the past three days, before even starting the diet, I have cut back on alcoholic beverages (a beer is a very "expensive" 12 ounces), and I am drinking more water and eating more fiber. I also am very motivated to exercise before I weigh myself in the morning, because running five miles makes me drop about 1.2 pounds.

I will take the average of the three days for both numbers:

Average weight: 200.6 pounds
Average food and drink: 45 ounces (2.8 pounds)

So, my starting target weight for the first week is:

200.6 + 2.8 = 203.4 pounds

Starting this week, I will never weigh more than 203.4 pounds!

I will do this for eleven weeks, dropping the target by a pound a week. Then I will assess if I want to lose any more. Thirteen years ago, when I was last 190 pounds, I was also less muscular than I am now, so I may not want to lose anything beyond that. But we'll see.

What will happen in the coming weeks? Will I go crazy? Will I be stuck eating four ounces of food per day for ten weeks? Will I have to fast when I get bloated or constipated and don't lose any weight in a day?

I'm going to do it no matter what! My pain will be your entertainment.

Let the experiment begin...